Stock Profit

Today I found that both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac took a severe beating on the stock market. This was not a one day event either. Their stock values have been declining during the past year. This week has been especially brutal. Investors are worried the government is going to bail out both companies and make the stock worthless, passing the cost on to the United States taxpayers. This scenario may very well play out. But I decided to take a position in both companies today.

There was a lot of trading and volatility in both of these stocks today. So I found myself checking the stock price every hour or so. Then I had to take into account my purchase price for both stocks to compute my profit for these stocks. These computations got old really quickly. Why shouldn’t I write a computer program to do this for me automatically? Now that I think about it, I did once write a program like this to calculate my profits (eventually losses) from purchasing Movie Gallery stock. Here is a screen shot of that program.

I now recall that I got tired of looking up the current trading price of Movie Gallery stock. So I added in a feature whereby the program automatically visited Yahoo Finance and pulled the latest price for me. The problem with this program is that is was hard coded for Movie Gallery stock. And it only supported profit computation for one stock at a time. What I really need to a portfolio profit calculator program. It will allow you to input the stocks you have purchased, along with the purchase prices. It will then grab the recent stock price and compute your overall profit.

Yes I know that brokerage web sites already do this for you. But I do not want to log into those sites and enter my credentials on any computer other than my locked down home computer. However I still would like a daily update of my profitability. Thus I need a flexible program to be written. Maybe I can carve out some time to do this soon. With the wild price swings of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I am going to need this program pronto.

As a final note, I remember in the really old days I coded up a really simple version of such a program. I have since lost the source code for that program. It was called ka-ching, because every time you ran it, it would make a ka-ching money sound if it computed a profit. Isn’t that funny? Conversely this program would make a toilet flushing sound if it computed a loss for your stocks. In my current work environment, I am going to have to pass on the sound effects.

Hottest Blogger

Playboy magazine is polling readers as to which of 9 female bloggers they would most like to see pose naked. You can vote yourself at the Hottest Female Bloggers web page. Personally I like Brigitte Dale the best. I have posted her picture here to the left. I have also already voted for Brigitte. She seems cute like the girl next door. And from what I can tell, her body seems delicious.

I would not be disappointed if Geoffrey Ellis won too. She has a full figure if you know what I mean. Too bad Geoffrey has already declared that she shall never pose naked for Playboy. But I wonder if she might be persuaded if the stakes were high enough. I cannot help but think that most of these females are taking advantage of their looks to improve their marketability in the marketplace. Why not take it to a whole new level by posing for Playboy?

The real bonus would be if all nine would pose for one issue of Playboy. That would be an issue that you would need to run out and buy. Don't you agree?

No Pay Classifieds

I am a subscriber and avid reader of 2600 Magazine. They have a section near the back of the magazine called 2600 Magazine Marketplace. Subscribers are allowed to advertise for free in this section. Sometimes the ads are as entertaining as the articles in the magazine. Last month an ad for No Pay Classifieds caught my eye. The ad also asked for people to link to the web site. I thought it might be good to help a fellow subscriber by linking to the site. However I decided to check the site out before recommending it. I was amused at what I found.

Apparently the no pay classifieds site is a front end to a big database that will serve up free ads specific to your geographic location. I was not about to type in any information about where I live. This site was founded by a guy advertising in a hacker magazine after all. So I tried to do some searches without entering my address. I never got any results. Now I am not sure if this is due to the fact that I did not enter my location information, or whether the site was broken. All I know is that I cannot in good faith recommend the site to anybody.

The site itself was not the real news story here. The real kicker was the story about the founder John Lambros. This guy has a huge web site documenting his bad experience in Brazil. Apparently this United States citizen was in Brazil and got arrested. A bunch of Brazilian lawyers proceeded to milk John and his family of a lot of money. They John claims he was tortured while in prison in Brazil. Furthermore John says they implanted a device in his brain to monitor and control him. Finally he was extradited to the United States where he is serving a very long prison sentence. John’s conclusion in the matter is that everyone should boycott Brazil as a result of his times there.
I have to give it to this guy. He has a huge amount of documentation published on the web about his story. There are a lot of copies of legal matters in the courts. And there is even an x-ray photograph of his brain implements. Now I cannot say for sure which if any part of his story is true. But the whole thing comes off as being crazy. The part about the brain implant drove it over the top. If you really want to get a taste of what I am talking about, do a Google search for boycott Brazil and you will see what I mean

Honeypot

I was reading the latest copy of 2600 magazine yesterday. Most articles in this magazine are usually very interesting. However I found one that hit the jackpot. It was “Capturing Botnet Malware Using a HoneyPot” by L0j1k. I have heard the term honeypot before. But I really did not get the concept until reading that article.

Basically the idea is to install a fresh version of Microsoft Windows. Then you customize the machine to look like a real machine by doing things like setting background wallpaper, adding some documents, etc. You make the machine vulnerable by changing the passwords to the word password. Finally you connect the machine to the Internet and wait for it to be infected with botnet malware.

The goal of this exercise is to monitor and analyze the techniques used by botnet installers. At some time in the future you can unplug the infected machine from the network, and see what types of nasty programs have been secretly installed. This sounds like a lot of fun. I am sure I can scrounge up an extra machine to use for this purpose.

I was thinking that I could take a more active approach to get bad programs installed on my computer. For example, I could search the Internet for evil programs that I could run on my machine. These are the ones that you normally want to avoid on your real machine. However I figure I could expedite the installation of malware by doing this. Then I could isolate the machine and find out what type of hacks had occurred on my machine.
Thanks to L0j1k (http://www.l0j1k.net) for sharing such an informative and interesting article.

Working on the Cleaner

In my day job I work on a team with a lot of other computer programmers. And there are many times when I need to share code with them. The official way to do this is to check the code into a source control system. However when coding a lot, I often need to just hand over a bunch of code. So I just copy the code to some place on the network where the other team members can grab the code.

The problem with copying code to the network is that it is sometimes slow. My code is usually already compiled. That means there are a lot of large binary files located with my source code. The other developers do not need the binaries. They can compile the source code themselves and get the binaries if they want them. So I usually spend a lot of time going through my directories removing the binaries to speed up the copy time. That is where I got the inspiration for my latest program "Cleaner".

Now the alpha or beta version of Cleaner that I have now is not ready for distribution. It is too specialized. And I have to make code changes just to get it to clean the right folder on my computer. However I plan to generalize the problem and post it here some time in the future. I envision this to be a general purpose program to free up space on your hard drive. Yes I know hard disk space is cheap. But when you need to do things like copy the code somewhere, space becomes important.

Cleaner is a good opportunity. I need it for work so I can code it up when I am on the clock at work. But I find no reason not to share it with the world. Although my company or its customers may own the rights to Cleaner, I do not think they will exercise that right and restrict me from posting it here. I might have to check with the legal department on that. In the mean time, get ready for Cleaner coming to a web site near you.

Notebook Program Released

When I first started working as a technical professional,. I was surrounded by a bunch of engineers. They encouraged me to keep an engineering notebook to record my work. Basically this was a spiral bound notebook that you would write in every day. You would record significant events that occurred that day. The importance was that you could look back in your notebook to remember important facts. So I began keeping an engineering notebook myself.

Later I transitioned into programming. But I kept my habit of logging my experiences in an engineering notebook. Right now I have a pile of notebooks recording work facts over the years. My last notebook filled up after I started my most recent job. All the work for my current project is performed on site at a customer's location. There is no supply cabinet here for me. So I started for the firsts time writing my programming notes on paper I grabbed from the printers.

After a while I realized that printer paper was not as easy to keep together as a spiral notebook. I was thinking about going back to a spiral notebook. But then I read a discussion about keeping such an engineering notebook. And the majority of posts to that discussion recommended that you keep such a log electronically. This was a very good idea. I began trying to figure out how to accomplish this. Then when I had a little free time, I wrote a little program to act as my electronic notebook.

My program is called Notebook. There is nothing really outstanding about it. When you first launch the program. it defaults to today's date. You can enter free form text in the notepad section. You can navigate to other days by pressing some buttons. The program simply stores all notepad data in text files, one for each day that you record some information. These days I am using this program daily to record my programming accomplishments. In fact, I have already transcribed all my printer paper notebook pages to electronic versions in Notebook.

Lame Marketing

I recently started a new job. So I have been very busy lately. When I come home, I have to do more work using my company laptop. So there does not seem to be much time to write up any kewl apps or fix bugs in the ones I already released. Hopefully this is just a temporary setback until things calm down at work.

So after working hard all day, and coming home for some more work, I decided to read some magazines. One magazine was one on music called Spin. It had an advertisement near the end of the issue from an antivirus software company. I think the company was AVG. They were hyping their latest antivirus software release.

Here was the premise. AVG said their software was so good, it was putting hackers out of business. So they asked Spin readers to give a hacker a hug. Apparently there is a web site where AVG furthers this movement. I tried to do a search on the web site. But I could not find nor remember the URL. What kind of nonsense is this? AVG needs to make $$$ selling its software. This I understand. But let's not get out of hand. I don't think I had even heard of this company before I read their ad. I would not put it past some hard core people to pull some pranks on the AVG website. I am just waiting for it to say something like "AVG-got-pwned". LOL.

I do have to hand it to the AVG PR people. They got me to pay attention to their ad. Moreover they got me to write a post about it. Silly rabbit tricks are for kids.